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Monday, May 14, 2007

Does Hillary talk like a girl?

Mark Liberman explains why we were right to yawn at that report on a psycholinguistic study that purported to find gender difference in Bill and Hillary's use of language.
I'm surprised to find this paper in a referreed psycholinguistic journal. The analysis is interesting, but its data has no logical connection whatever to gender differences. There are exactly two subjects, and it's true that one them is female while the other is male. But in addition, one of them is from a suburb of Chicago while the other is from rural Arkansas. So perhaps this is really a study about "Regional Differences in the Media Interviews of Bill and Hillary Clinton"? And the two subjects differ in many other ways as well -- the article could with equal plausibility have been presented as telling us about "Social Class Differences" or "The Effect of Early Family Life". Or just "Individual Differences".

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